Inara Communications
Inara Communications is a Nairobi-based civic communication firm. We produce animated film about how democratic life actually works — how to check a message before forwarding it, what hate speech does to a campaign season, why a journalist's safety is a voter's concern, and what it takes to accept a result you did not want.
The problem we work on
Most civic information fails for boring reasons. It is written in formal language when the audience speaks Sheng'. It assumes a quiet room and a private screen. It arrives as a leaflet for people who get their news as a forwarded video. It is captioned for hearing audiences and then, if budget survives, interpreted for Deaf audiences in a separate edit that never quite gets made.
We build for those constraints from the first storyboard rather than treating them as an accessibility pass at the end.
Accessibility is a production decision, not a post-production one. Seven of our twelve films carry a Kenyan Sign Language interpreter on screen for their full running time, composed into the frame from the start. All twelve are subtitled, so they work with the sound off.
How the films are made
Each film takes one idea and stages it as an argument between people who like each other. A friend forwards a scam. Someone repeats a rumour about a candidate. A group in a pool hall falls out over a loss. The correction comes from inside the group, which is where corrections actually land.
The animation is deliberately simple and the settings are ordinary — a bedroom, a bus stop, a street corner, a living room. That keeps production costs low enough to make a library rather than a single flagship piece, and it makes re-voicing into additional languages straightforward.
Language
The library currently runs in Kiswahili and Sheng', with English editions of four films for English-first audiences and partner distribution. The productions are structured so that further language tracks require new voice and subtitle work only, not reanimation.